New Delhi: The Vaclav Havel Center has named writer Arundhati Roy a winner of the 2024 ‘Disturbing the Peace’ Award for a Courageous Writer at Risk.
Roy is one of two winners, the other is the Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi.
The VHC is a non-profit based in the United States and gives out an annual award for writers at risk for speaking out against injustice. The award is named after Vaclav Havel, former president of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic.
Announcing the Award, its jury member, author Salil Tripathi, said that Havel was often persecuted “because he believed in living the truth and disturbing the peace.”
“The peace he disturbed was not of calm serenity, but the imposed silence of an authoritarian state. And he defied the state with reason, arguments, imagination, a commitment to truth, and non-violence. The world remains in a state where governments continue to suppress inconvenient voices. But those voices remain unbending: these writers and artists have integrity, courage, and determination of the kind Havel displayed,” he said.
Tripathi noted that while Iran’s Salehi is imprisoned for using song to challenge Iran’s theocratic autocracy, India’s Arundhati Roy “speaks for its marginalised and dispossessed” whose lands are taken away for big business, oppose India’s nuclear policies, speak up for the Dalits; and who fight for their self-determination.
Tripathi was joined on the jury by Egyptian-British software developer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Czech-Slovak human rights attorney Barbora Bukovská, ex-Permanent Representative to the UN for the Czech Republic Martin Palouš, and US ex-ambassador to the Czech Republic John Shattuck.
Roy is best known for her 1997 novel The God of Small Things which won the Booker Prize for Fiction. Her second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, published in 2017, was long listed for the Booker.
Among many honours, Roy recently won the prestigious Pen Pinter Prize 2024.
In 2010, Roy was accused of sedition along with Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani and others by Delhi Police for their “anti-India” speech at a 2010 convention. Two months ago, after a gap of 14 years, the lieutenant governor of Delhi, Vinai Kumar Saxena, sanctioned the prosecution of Roy and academic Showkat Hussain under Section 45 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in connection with a 2010 speech. They are accused of “delivering provocative speeches in public”.
The award includes a $5,000 cash prize. Previous recipients are El-Fattah (2023); Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov (2022); Belarusian poet Dmitri Strotsev (2021); Cuban author Angel Santiesteban Prats (2020); Turkish writer and journalist Asli Erdogan (2019); Chinese author, reporter, musician, and poet Liao Yiwu (2018); Kurdish novelist Burhan Sönmez (2017); and Burmese writer Ma Thida (2016).
